Terry and I climb a narrow trail
in search of an old water intake.
We find rusty pipe but no collection box.
Mountain plumbing is constant crisis
as storms re-engineer the landscape
while three hundred houses wait to wash.
Terry, you should know, operated
the water system for years and years
in our old hippie town.

Moving on, we walk around the once-reservoir
that collapsed in the winter of '82.
Now that was a crisis.
I say I used to come to this hilltop
every day at sunset with my dog
to meet a woman with her dog
to witness, to feel in our flesh
the cool, the color, the end of the day.
Terry says thirty or forty years ago
he used to come to this hilltop
every solstice to drop acid with his buddies.
"When was the last time you took LSD?" I ask.
"Last week," Terry says.

Terry, you should know, is seventy-two
with cardiac plumbing that has
weathered a few storms.
He says the trips are milder now, sweeter,
like spring-water from the glen on the hill
above his cabin, gurgles out slowly
but worth the wait at the end of that trail
where only coyotes go.